Foxit PDF IFilter

1. What is Foxit PDF IFilter?
Foxit PDF IFilter is an application designed to help users index a large amount of PDF documents and then quickly find text within these documents. It acts as a plug-in for full-text search engines that scans documents for text and properties (also called attributes), extracts text from documents, filters out formatting and retaining information about text position, and extracts properties of an entire document.

2. Is Foxit PDF IFilter free?
Foxit PDF IFilter can be used for free on desktop environment. However, users need to purchase licenses when they use Foxit PDF IFilter on server environments.

3. I have a computer with one hyper-threading processor inside. Do I need to buy a license for 2 CPUs for the machine?
We will only count the "real" numbers of processors reported by your system. Please go to Start > Programs > Accessories > System Tools > System Information to check your CPU numbers.

4. What is the Foxit PDF IFilter's role in the PDF indexing process and PDF text search?
Foxit PDF IFilter acts as a plug-in for full-text search engines. A search engine usually works in two steps:

Step 1, the search engine goes through a designated place, e.g. a file folder or a database, and indexes all documents or newly modified documents, including PDF documents, in the background and creates internal data to store the indexing result.

Step 2, a user specifies some keywords he would like to search and the search engine answers the query immediately by looking up the indexing result and responds to the user with all the documents that contain the keywords.

During Step 1, the search engine itself doesn't understand the format of a PDF document. Therefore, it looks in the windows registry for an appropriate PDF IFilter and finds the Foxit PDF IFilter. Foxit PDF IFilter understands the PDF format. It filters out embedded formatting and extracts text from the document and returns text back to the search engine. Further information about IFilter specification can be found on the Microsoft Web site.

5. Do I have to remove Adobe PDF IFilter to install Foxit PDF IFilter?
Yes.

6. I have installed Foxit PDF IFilter under WSS, but why can't I index PDF files?
WSS requires extra registry settings when you install Foxit PDF IFilter. You need to add the following registry entry, and then set the registry entry value to pdf:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Shared Tools\Web Server Extensions\12.0 \Search\Applications\<GUID>\Gather\Search\Extensions\ExtensionList\38

To do this, follow these steps:
a. Click Start, click Run, type regedit, and then click OK.
b. Locate and then click the following registry subkey:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Shared Tools\Web Server Extensions \12.0\Search\Applications\GUID\Gather\Search\Extensions\ExtensionList
c. On the Edit menu, point to New, and then click String Value.
d. Type 38, and then press ENTER.
e. Right-click the registry entry that you created, and then click Modify.
f. In the Value data box, type pdf, and then click OK.

7. Where do I need to install the Foxit PDF IFilter in MOSS 2007?
In MOSS 2007, the Foxit PDF IFilter only needs to be installed on the index server.

8. How to verify the correct installation of Foxit PDF IFilter?
Firstly, please check if Foxit PDF IFilter appears in the list of programs on the Program Start Menu after installation.

Secondly, you can download IFilter detection tools to inspect IFilter installation information in the registry, e.g. the filtreg.exe program.

Thirdly, install Windows Desktop Search to verify if the text in PDF files can be found.

9. How to upgrade Foxit PDF IFilter? Do I need to reboot the machine?
You need to uninstall the old version of Foxit PDF IFilter to install the new one. You do not have to reboot your machine after update.

10. Do I have to rebuild index after updating?
That depends. Foxit PDF IFilter consists of a core layer and an installation layer. When you upgrade the installation layer, you do not need to re-do a full index. But when you upgrade the core layer, you may need to rebuild index on your computer.

11. Why can't I find some PDF files?
There might be three reasons:

First, Foxit PDF IFilter can not index password-protected PDF files.

Second, the PDF file doesn't contain searchable text. You can check if there is searchable text in the PDF file by opening it in Foxit Reader and selecting the text with the Select Text tool. Or you can enter into the Text Viewer mode to select text. If neither method highlights any text, it is likely that the PDF contains a source image of text which Foxit PDF IFilter can not index.

Third, the PDF file doesn't contain text that is properly encoded. If the file contains searchable text, yet you cannot find the text with Find Tool in Foxit Reader, then the text may not be properly encoded.

12. Why can't Foxit PDF IFilter work after Microsoft updates? Do I have to re-install it?
If you installed the Foxit PDF IFilter on your search server, the IFilter does not work after you install a Microsoft update. It is because that the upgrade program automatically overwrites the registry value of Foxit PDF IFilter with that of Adobe PDF IFilter.

To make it work again, you must reinstall Foxit PDF IFilter. In this case, you do not have to uninstall IFilter. You can just run the Foxit IFilter MSI program again and select the repair function.

In addition, we will contact Microsoft to address this issue shortly.

13. I cannot find some Japanese words under MOSS. What is the problem?
MOSS may have problems when trying to find word breaks in Japanese documents because these words are indexed as complete phrases but not individual words.

To verify whether MOSS is able to search some individual Japanese words, you can open the PDF file with Foxit Reader > copy all the text into a text file > index this text file > try to search the words. If you still cannot find the words, you can confirm that the problem is indeed caused by MOSS. If you can find the words, please kindly contact us at support@foxitsoftware.com.

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